Birth of the Kingdom

by Jan Guillou

  ‘That’s impossible. We took a vow before Our Lady. What else can I do for you?’

  ‘Can you swear your loyalty?’ asked the king, as if changing the subject.

  ‘I already did that when we both were young. My word holds fast, even if yours does not,’ said Arn.

  Then the king smiled for the first time during this argument, nodding in acknowledgment that Arn’s arrow could still strike home.

  ‘Have my uncle and my brother sworn you their loyalty?’ Arn asked, and the other three in the room all nodded.

  Arn stood up without further ado, drew his sword, and fell to his knees before King Knut. He set the sword with the point on the stone floor, crossed himself, and grasped it with both hands.

  ‘I, Arn Magnusson, swear that as long as you are king of the Folkungs I shall be true to you, Knut Eriksson, in…auxilium et consilium,’ he said, hesitating only when he came to those last words in Latin. Then he stood up, slipped his sword back in its sheath, and went back to his seat and sat down.

  ‘What did you mean by those last foreign words?’ asked the king.

  ‘That which a knight must swear, I cannot say in our language, but it is no less worthy in church language,’ said Arn with a shrug. ‘Auxilium is one thing I swore to you, which means assistance…or support…or my sword, you might say. And consilium is the other thing a knight promises his king. It means that I have sworn always to stand by you and offer true counsel, to the best of my ability.’

  ‘Good,’ said King Knut. ‘Then give me one piece of advice. Archbishop Petrus talks a great deal about how I must atone for my sin of having killed Karl Sverkersson. I don’t know how much of his talk is genuine faith in God and how much is merely his desire to vex me. Now he wants me to send a crusade to the Holy Land as atonement. You must have an opinion on this, having fought there for more than twenty years?’

  ‘Yes, I certainly do. Build a cloister, donate gold and forests, build a church, buy relics from Rome for the archbishop’s cathedral. Do any of these things, or in the worst case all of them, rather than mount a crusade. If you send Folkungs and Eriks to the Holy Land they will all be slaughtered like sheep and for no reason, other than to cause more grief.’

  ‘And you say that you are sure of this?’ asked the king. ‘Is the courage in our breast not sufficient, our faith not strong enough, our swords not good enough?’

  ‘No, they are not!’ said Arn.

  A despondent silence fell over the council chamber.

  While the worst of the noise was issuing from the council chamber in the east tower, Queen Blanca and Cecilia Rosa climbed up to the battlement so they would be free of prying eyes. But the two Cecilias had no difficulty understanding Birger Brosa’s fury. It was because Arn Magnusson was defying him. Arn insisted on honouring his vow, while Birger Brosa thought he should rescind the oath so that Cecilia Rosa could go to Riseberga convent, be promoted to abbess, and then repay the debts she owed.

  That was what was going on inside the council chamber; it was clear as water.

  They tried to listen but could only hear clearly when Birger Brosa was holding forth, as he did time after time, shouting with contempt about love.

  Cecilia Rosa felt paralysed; she could hardly think. Arn was inside, less than an arrow-shot away. It was true and yet inconceivable. Her thoughts ran in circles. as if holding her captive.

  But Queen Blanca was thinking more sharply. She knew that it was high time to make a decision. ‘Come!’ she said to Cecilia Rosa, taking her by the hand. ‘We’ll go downstairs, drink some white wine, and decide what to do. It’s no use standing here listening to the noise of the menfolk.’

  ‘Look!’ said Cecilia Rosa, pointing over the battlement as if she were only half awake. ‘Here comes the archbishop and his retinue.’

  Up on the road from the north boat harbour they could see the archbishop’s cross flashing silver, carried by an outrider in the vanguard of the procession. Behind the outrider with the cross they could see the colours of many bishop’s capes, but also the colours of all the retainers, mostly in red mantles, since the archbishop was a Sverker, after all.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cecilia Blanca, ‘I saw them coming and suddenly I understood how we must arrange everything before the men even know what’s happening. Come on!’

  She dragged Cecilia Rosa down one floor to the king’s chamber, called for wine, and shoved her friend onto a pile of pillows and cushions from Lübeck and France on one of the beds. They made themselves comfortable without saying a word. Cecilia Rosa still seemed more lost in a dream than awake.

  ‘Now you must pull yourself together, my friend, both of us must,’ said the queen resolutely. ‘We have to think, we have to make a decision, and above all we have to act.’

  ‘How can the jarl defy the will of Our Lady? I simply don’t understand it,’ Cecilia Rosa murmured.

  ‘That’s how it is with men,’ snorted the queen. ‘If they find that the plans of God and His Saints agree with their own, then everything is fine. If their own thoughts of power lead in a different direction, they probably think that God will come strolling along behind. That’s the way they are. But we don’t have much time now, and you have to think clearly!’

  Cecilia Rosa took a deep breath and closed her eyes. ‘I’ll try, really I will, I promise. But you must understand that this is not easy for me. After all these years, at the very moment that I succumbed to doubt for the first time, Our Lady brought Arn back to me. What did She mean by that? Isn’t it strange?’

  ‘Yes, it’s more than strange,’ Cecilia Blanca was quick to admit. ‘When we were sitting out there next to the lily field, we were contemplating your unhappiness and my joy. You would have to give up your dream for my sake. I was sad but not surprised that you would accept your unhappiness for the sake of our friendship.’

  ‘You would have done the same for me,’ Cecilia Rosa murmured.

  ‘Wake up now, dear friend!’ the queen insisted. ‘It’s happening now, right now. Just as Our Lady showed us; now I must do the same for you. You shall not take the veil and the cross, you shall go to Arn Magnusson’s bridal bed, and the sooner the better!’

  ‘But what will we do when the men rage against it?’ Cecilia Rosa wondered hopelessly.

  ‘Where is your resolve? This isn’t like you. Pull yourself together, dearest Cecilia,’ said the queen impatiently. ‘Right now we must think and act; this is no time for dreaming. Do you remember back at Gudhem when we used confession as a weapon?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cecilia Rosa. ‘Those arrows struck home better than we could have hoped.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the queen, encouraged by the sight of Cecilia Rosa finally waking up. ‘And today we’re going to do the same thing. The archbishop will soon be sitting out there in his tent, hobnobbing with the people before the council meeting. He’s showing his love for the lowliest sheep in God’s flock, that hypocrite. And anyone at all can come and kiss the bishop’s ring and confess. That also applies to a queen and an yconoma from Riseberga…’

  ‘What sort of message are we going to send in our confession this time?’ Cecilia Rosa asked eagerly, her eyes glittering and with new colour in her cheeks.

  ‘I will say how anguished I am at the thought of sending my dearest friend into the convent merely for my own gain, for my children’s right of inheritance to the crown. And then it will be your turn—’

  ‘No, don’t say a word! Let me think first. All right, I’ll confess that I saw the miracle of Our Lady, when she listened to Arn’s and my prayers for more than twenty years and sent him home unharmed. And that his holy vow is now about to be fulfilled. In this way Our Lady is showing us how great love can be, how we should never give up hope…and how I feel anguish because they are asking me to fulfil earthly obligations by going to the convent instead of accepting the gift of Our Lady. All this is true. Do you think those words will suffice?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said the queen. ‘I think that our esteemed archbish
op will quickly remember God’s words about the miracle of love. He will become a strong advocate for the love between you and Arn, which must not be desecrated, because—’

  ‘Because we would all become implicated in a great sin by denying the obvious and clearly demonstrated will of Our Lady!’ Cecilia Rosa said with a laugh.

  They were now utterly exhilarated and bursting with ideas. Cecilia Blanca even came up with new plans for how they could eat supper in such a way that there would no longer be any going back to the convent. Cecilia Rosa was astonished, blushing when she heard about these stratagems. But they finally realized that they had no time to lose; they took each other’s hand and ran like young girls down the spiral tower staircase, eager to deliver the true confessions that would turn all the men’s plans into ashes and ruins. When they came out into the courtyard they forced themselves to stop, bowed their heads, and began walking gravely and demurely over toward the archbishop’s tent outside the walls.

  The heated argument in the council chamber of the east tower had subsided and turned into a long discussion as a result of Arn’s harsh words about the impossibility of mounting a crusade from the Gothic lands and Svealand. Both the king and the jarl were offended by the curt way he had dismissed the capability of Nordic men.

  Arn had been forced to elucidate, and what he told the others made them both reflect and listen with dread.

  Retaking the Holy Land now from the Saracens, since the fall of Jerusalem, would require an army of no less than sixty thousand men, Arn began. And an army that big would be difficult to keep supplied with food and water; it would have to be constantly in motion, plundering its way forward. So they wouldn’t be able to survive without a strong cavalry, and that alone made the use of Nordic warriors impossible. And sixty thousand men was such an enormous number that it would take every man capable of bearing arms in the two Gothic lands as well as Svealand.

  But what if they did only what the Church demanded, their duty before God, and contributed as best they could, scraping together as many men as possible? What would that mean?

  Ten thousand foot soldiers, said Arn. If King Knut, after much effort and persuasion and threats, managed to convince everyone that God truly wanted all Nordic men who could handle a sword or at least a pitchfork to head off for Jerusalem for the sake of their salvation – if the whole country could be convinced – then exactly how would they get there?

  They would sail, of course. On the way up from England just off the coast of Jutland, Arn and his ship had met a Danish crusader army of about fifty ships with three or four thousand men aboard, although without horses. Arn and Harald had agreed that all these men were on their way to their own slaughter. They would cause more trouble rather than be of any help, if indeed they even managed to arrive safely.

  Let’s say that King Knut, Arn went on, could indeed sail with a force of about that size. What would happen when they arrived in the Holy Land? Well, the only place where new crusaders could land was the city of Saint Jean d’Acre, the last Christian foothold in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and it was now extremely crowded. Would thousands of Norsemen without cavalry be received with gratitude? No, they would just be more mouths to feed. And what use would they be to the Christian army? Perhaps they could run next to the cavalry, protecting the knights’ horses. But the Norsemen could not be a fighting force of any importance, because there were too few of them to form their own army. And besides, they didn’t understand Frankish.

  It would not merely be certain death; it would be a death that was unnecessary and dishonourable. And those who died would not die with the firm conviction that death in the Holy Land would grant them forgiveness for all their sins and lead them to Paradise.

  Birger Brosa attempted to object, but his earlier wrath had now vanished as if blown away on the wind. He spoke softly and often with a smile, balancing his ale tankard on the knee of his crossed leg.

  ‘Knut and I are not accustomed to thinking of ourselves as lambs being led to the slaughter,’ he said. ‘At the start of the fight for the king’s crown, in the years after you left, we beat the Sverkers in all our encounters except one. The final battle was outside Bjälbo, and our victory was great, although the enemy had a force almost twice as large as ours. Since then there has been peace in the kingdom. There were more than three thousand Folkungs and Eriks with our kinsmen standing side by side, one phalanx next to another. It was a formidable force. Yet you still think that we would be like lambs? That’s hard to imagine. What if this force that stood outside Bjälbo in the battle of the fields of blood stood on the soil of the Holy Land?’

  ‘There we would indeed have to stand,’ said Arn. ‘The enemy would be on horseback, so we couldn’t attack, nor could we choose the time and place. The sun would reap its victims like willows in the summertime; the rain and the cloying red mud would drag us down into hopelessness and disease in the winter. The enemy would suddenly come from behind on fast horses, and a hundred men would die and another hundred be wounded and then the enemy would be gone. And there we would stand. The next day the same thing. None of us would have a chance to land a single sword blow before we were all dead.’

  ‘But if they come on horses,’ Birger Brosa mused, ‘then we could take them with arrows and lances. A man on horseback has twice as many things to keep track of; if he falls, he’ll be dead, and if he rides into the lances he’ll end up impaled.’

  Arn took a deep breath, stood up, and went over to the heavy oak table in the middle of the room. He cleared off the writing implements, seals, and parchment, and drew with his finger in the dust.

  If the army were standing still out on the flat field with good visibility in all directions, the enemy would just make small sorties, since the sun and thirst would do the heavy work.

  If the army didn’t move it would die. If the army moved it would have to extend from the front to the rear, and then the attacks would come quickly from either direction. Saracen horsemen would ride up, shoot two or three arrows which almost all would strike home, and then disappear. After each such attack there would be dead and wounded to care for.

  The Saracens also had some heavy cavalry with long lances, just like the Christians did. An inexperienced Nordic army would surely tempt the Saracens to use that weapon as well.

  Arn described how the sky could suddenly darken with a tremendous wall of dust, how they would soon hear the ground shaking, and how they wouldn’t be able to see clearly in all that dust before the cavalry struck with full force, riding straight in among the foot soldiers, storming forward without resistance straight through the army and cutting it in half, then turning and coming back again. Three thousand warriors on foot in the Holy Land would have died in less time than they’d been arguing and discussing in this chamber, said Arn in conclusion. Then he went back to his seat.

  ‘I’m thinking of several things when I hear you tell all this, kinsman,’ said Birger Brosa. ‘Your honesty is great, I know that. What you tell us I believe to be true, which means that it could save us from the greatest folly.’

  ‘That is my hope,’ said Arn. ‘I have sworn our king auxilium, and that’s not something I take lightly.’

  ‘No,’ said Birger Brosa with a smile reflecting his true nature, ‘that you do not. Tomorrow at the council we will therefore delight our archbishop and his followers with the decision to build a new cloister in…well, where do you think, Knut?’

  ‘Julita,’ said the king. ‘It should be in Svealand where the voice of God is heard least strongly, and that would probably satisfy our bishops the most.’

  ‘Then Julita it shall be, and perhaps we will finally have a moment of peace from the talk of a crusade,’ said Birger Brosa. ‘But this is our decision for the present. For the future there is another and bigger question. If a Saracen army could defeat us so easily, could a Frankish army do the same? Or an English or Saxon one?’

  ‘Or a Danish one,’ said Arn. ‘If we encountered any of these armies on their home tu
rf. But our land lies at the extreme end of the earth, and it would be no simple task to bring a large army all the way here. The Saracens will never come this far, nor will the Franks or the English or the Normans. But it’s less certain with the Saxons and Danes.’

  ‘We should reconsider,’ said Birger Brosa, with a look at King Knut, who nodded in agreement. ‘Times are changing out in the world; we have learned as much when it comes to trade, which has served us well. But if we are to survive and flourish as a kingdom in this new age—’

  ‘Then we have plenty of new things to learn!’ the king completed his thought.

  ‘Arn,’ the king went on earnestly, ‘my childhood friend, you who once helped me to gain the crown. Will you take a seat on our council? Will you be our marshal?’

  Arn stood up and bowed to the king and then to the jarl, as a sign that he acquiesced at once, as he had sworn to do. Then Birger Brosa went over and embraced him, pounding him hard on the back.

  ‘It’s a blessing that you have come back to us, Arn, my dear nephew. I’m a man who seldom explains himself or makes excuses. So this is not easy for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arn, ‘you surprised me. That wasn’t the way I remembered the wisest man of all in our clan, the one from whom we all tried to learn.’

  ‘All the better that there were few witnesses today,’ Birger Brosa said with a smile, ‘and that they were my closest kinsmen next to my own sons and my friend the king. Otherwise my reputation would have suffered. As far as Cecilia Algotsdotter is concerned…’

  He paused, trying to tempt Arn to object, but Arn waited him out in silence.